Chapter 1. Using XML for Electronic Data Interchange IN THIS CHAPTER In an evolution that lasted almost a decade, the Internet world saw the use of HTML in the creation of billions of Web pages of information for human consumption. Towards the end of the HTML evolution, the pundits of technology saw another vision of the evolution of Internet computers collaborating over the Internet. The billions of pages of information on the Internet might be too much for a single human to understand, but computers could definitely assist organizations to leverage this information. Although HTML is perfect for human consumption, it is unusable as an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standard for communications between two or more computers. This has given birth to Extensible Markup Language (XML). Like HTML, it is also a subset of the SGML standard, but unlike HTML, it is tailored for machine consumption. In this chapter, you will learn about the relationship between XML, EDI, and Java. This chapter will also describe the Java APIs that are available for building XML-enabled applications. |